Christless Christianity (chapters 1-4) - [2 Timothy 4:1-4]

Our great God and Savior, we thank you this morning for your kindness and your love to us in the person and work of the

Lord Jesus Christ. We are overwhelmed as we consider how he condescended, left his throne, came to earth, took to himself human flesh, lived a spotless, perfect life, the one that we ought to live, then took upon himself our punishment, went to the cross, and died a sacrificial death on our behalf, that we might have all our sins forgiven, and then he was raised gloriously on the third day, that we might know that you have accepted the payment of his death as payment in full for our sins.

Father, we praise you for that, and we pray that you'd bless our time this morning as we talk about the modern church and what's going on within her walls.

We pray for these things in Jesus' name. Amen. So for a moment, because it's good to refer to the

Bible, let's look at 2 Timothy 4, a familiar passage, but I want to bring out a few things before we start this morning.

Our topic is derived from a book by Michael Horton called

Christless Christianity. And you know, if you just think about that for a moment, it sounds like what?

Christless Christianity. How do you do that? Sounds like an oxymoron. Sounds like a contradiction in terms.

And it should be. 2 Timothy chapter 4.

The Apostle Paul writing to Timothy, instructing him on how to basically operate, lead a local church.

And he says, I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead by his appearing and his kingdom.

Preach the word. Be ready in season and out of season. Reprove, rebuke and exhort with complete patience and teaching.

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.

As for you, always be sober minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.

And as we look around American evangelicalism, I think

Paul could write that today. I think he could say, these are the things that you should do and here's why you should do them.

Preach the word. And what does it mean to preach the word, by the way? Proclaim the gospel.

OK, that's a better answer than I would expect, because what do I expect to hear when I say preach the word, preach the

Bible? When you say preach the gospel, that means more because it means, yes, we want to preach the

Bible. But if the Bible doesn't include the gospel or the good news about Jesus Christ, then we are ultimately failing as preachers.

I've said this before, but in light of this title, Christless Christianity, just imagine coming to church on a

Sunday morning, the pastor gets up on the pulpit and never mentions the Lord Jesus Christ, except for maybe when he prays.

Could that happen? It happens every Sunday. Not here.

But in pulpits, I talked to a guy from TMS that I went to school with a few years ago, and he was preaching through the

Psalms and he said, basically that, because I asked him, I said, oh, the Psalms, that's very interesting.

I said, let me ask you something. If a rabbi showed up on Sunday morning and listened to your sermon and greeted you at the door and said that was excellent, matter of fact,

I'd like to use it next Saturday before my congregation, what would you think? And he goes, well, I'd be encouraged.

And I thought, so, I mean, obviously, if he said, I repent, I receive the

Lord Jesus, and now I want to proclaim him to my congregation, that would be one thing. But if he just says,

I'd like to take your notes, because, you know, in his mind, he's thinking, thankfully, you didn't give me any of that Christian stuff, and I'd just like to go through your notes next

Sunday or next Saturday with my congregation, and he said, this man I was talking to said, that would be okay with me, because as long as I was faithful to the text,

I'd be fine with that. Yeah, I was a little taken aback.

I go, so it wouldn't bother you that he didn't, you know, he wasn't offended by your preaching?

No. We need to be uniquely

Christian, even as we go through the Old Testament. There needs to be something Christian about it, pointing to Christ.

We would say this, that in the Old Testament, before Christ is born, that everything is pointing toward him, right?

And so there are mysteries, there are unknown things, they don't know who Jesus is, but they know there has to be a

Redeemer. Well, how would they know that the way some people preach the

Old Testament? And the answer is, they wouldn't. Anyway, with that said, let me go to our quiz here, because we have way too many questions and not enough time.

I don't know who planned this thing. Okay, it was me. Number one, true or false, our happiness is a worthy measure of truth.

Well, that's easy, and I like to start with the nice slow ones, you know, right across the plate, where you can just kind of step back and go, boom, hammer them, because it is baseball season.

Horton says, it is easy to become distracted from Christ as the only hope for sinners. Why do people come to church?

A lot of times it's what? For good advice? For helpful hints on life?

Horton goes on to say, where everything is measured by our happiness rather than by God's holiness, the sense of our being sinners becomes secondary, if not offensive.

If we are good people who have lost our way, but with the proper instructions and motivation can become a better person, then what do we need?

Maybe a life coach, somebody to encourage us. But we don't need a redeemer.

We don't need somebody to save us from our sins. We just need somebody to help us live a better life.

So, our happiness is not a worthy measure of truth. Number two, many evangelical churches proclaim, do better, try harder.

That's true, and thus the title of the book,

Christless Christianity. You go to a church on Sunday morning, and it says it's a

Christian church, and then it is a series of bromides, slogans, thoughts about how to improve your life, how to improve your marriage, how to improve your relationship with your neighbors.

Horton says, Christless Christianity, he says, sounds a bit harsh, doesn't it? A little shallow, sometimes distracted, even a little human -centered, rather than Christ -centered from time to time, but Christless?

Then he says, let me be a little more precise about what I am assuming to be the regular diet in many churches across America today.

Do more, try harder. I think that this is the pervasive message across the spectrum today.

Now, let me just say something about, do better, try harder. Why would somebody preach that message?

Why would somebody get up on the pulpit and say, do better, try harder? Andrew? Okay, it feels good, right?

If we can check off some lists and go, yep, we're doing that, we're doing that, we feel better. You were saying?

Somebody else? Right, and I mean, that's the reality, right?

We never really arrive, so if you encourage us to do better and try harder, then there is that kind of sense of, well, this matches my life, sure.

Okay, you know, could it be a sanctification message if we say, do better, try harder?

Yes, but what is do better, try harder, by the way? Is that gospel? What is it?

It's law. Do better, try harder, law. And if I say, here's my message to you today, law.

Be, therefore, perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect. Are you encouraged? Okay, my message to you today is be perfect.

Thank you, Pastor. You've really helped me. I was thinking I was done striving for perfection, but now, you know,

I'm going to keep going. Number three, what are the

High Holy Days of American Evangelicalism? I like this one.

It's kind of, you know, the sort of no -co bit here from Horton.

What are the High Holy Days of American Evangelicalism? He says, the High Holy Days of the

American church calendar are Memorial Day, Independence Day, Father's Day, and Mother's Day, often complete with giant

American flags, a color guard, and patriotic songs. The sterner version of do more, try harder helped get the culture wars off the ground.

At the same time, more liberal bodies could be just as shrill with their do more, try harder list on the left and their weekly calls to action rather than clear proclamation of Christ.

So it's not just conservatives. Liberals can do this, too. But when you start, you know, making

Memorial Day about, you know, the sacrifice of soldiers, yada -da -da -da, and that's what you do on Sunday, or Mother's Day, aren't mothers wonderful?

Yes, they are. Father's Day, but what does the Bible say? Preach the word.

And all these things, you know, what would the

Apostle Paul or any of the apostles have thought about, you know, this

Sunday we're going to celebrate fathers. This Sunday we're going to celebrate our nation and its independence.

This Sunday we're going, you know, fill in the blank. They would have said, what are you guys talking about, this nation?

I mean, it's just a completely foreign concept. And so, you know, kind of the patriotism that can seep into American churches is definitely not biblical or healthy.

Number four, true or false, American evangelicalism is Christian. I mean, again, doesn't that sound like, well, wait a minute,

I really should say true. American evangelicalism is

Christian. That's a very fair question. But you know what a teacher says when you come up and you say, can you define that, you know, on the exam?

What does a teacher say? If I tell you what it means, then what? You'll know the answer.

Why don't I just answer the quiz? Here, give me your quiz. I'll just answer it for you. See, that's the kind of teacher

I'd be. Why don't you just give me your exam and I'll just answer it for you. Here's what he says.

Judging by its commercial, political, and media success, the evangelical movement seems to be booming.

Then he says, but is it still Christian? I'm not asking that question glibly or simply to provoke a reaction, although it does.

My concern is that we are getting dangerously close to the place in everyday American church life where the

Bible is mined for relevant quotes but is largely irrelevant on its own terms.

Even when you think about, you know, the conversations you might have with unbelievers, when he says the

Bible is mined for relevant quotes, that's kind of what they do. And have you ever been in a church where it felt like the pastor was just pulling out quotes to sort of make his point out of the

Bible? I mean, I've sat in churches, so -called churches, and you know that I'll say so -called churches because when they meet twice on Saturday and three times on Sunday, I'm not really confident of what they're all about.

And this one church I'm thinking of in particular, the pastor will project verses up on the screen, but what he does is he has like maybe seven or eight different versions, and he picks a verse from a version that fits what he wants to say, if that makes sense.

So in other words, he's pulling out relevant quotes, but he doesn't really set the context because the context is sort of irrelevant to his point.

Horton goes on to say, God is used as a personal resource rather than known, worshipped, and trusted.

Jesus Christ is a coach with a good game plan for our victory rather than a

Savior who has already achieved it for us. Think about that again. Do better.

Try harder. Jesus as a coach, as an encourager, as a teacher, but not as a

Savior who's already accomplished everything for us. Salvation is more a matter of living our best life now than being saved from God's judgment by God himself.

And kind of the repeating theme through this book,

Christless Christianity, is this, that American evangelicalism has become not about objective truth, not about creeds, confessions, scripture, the gospel, but about what?

What do you think might trump those things to Americans or for Americans?

Would you say that a little louder?

Feelings. Cheryl, what did you say? Law and do.

But feelings really are the essence of it. Let me ask you this.

When people go to a new church, what is their most common comment about it?

In other words, you say to somebody who was just down, let's say they were in, I'll pick a state,

Tennessee, and they went to church down there. And you say, well, what did you think? What are you most likely to hear?

I like it or I don't like it. They were friendly. I really liked the worship, which by that they mean what?

The music. So you'll hear a lot about how the service meant that made them feel.

You won't hear a lot about what? The content of it. Right.

The sermon. What was the what was the service all about? So is

American evangelicalism Christian? Sometimes. Number five.

Yeah, I would say, you know, in large measure, I think that's false. You can go to a lot of evangelical churches and never get a sense of what it means to be a

Christian. I mean, that church I mentioned, Saddleback, you can you can go there on Saturday and Sunday and not hear the gospel at all.

And they'll basically tell you, well, you know, we're just here to encourage people on the weekends. We want them to get used to the idea of coming to church because they're unchurched people.

And so our goal is to get them in the habit of coming here. And then, like if they show up on a Tuesday or Wednesday night or whatever for one of these small groups, then they'll hear the gospel.

Yeah. Joel Osteen. And in fact, there's a basically a whole chapter of this book that's devoted to him. And I think we'll probably get to some of some things about him, although I avoided probably some of the most egregious quotes by him.

But yeah, that's right. Yeah.

Well, of course she is. You know, she his wife's pretty bad. Well, where did she learn

A and B? Where did you get the idea that she should be preaching? So, you know, there's a there's a double problem there.

Number five, true or false. What most people long for is to hear about a sin bearing Christ.

Well, that's obviously going to be false. Because what does that mean? If you're talking about a sin bearing

Christ, then that necessarily means that you've heard about your own sin. Who wants to go to church and hear about that?

That's that's pretty awful. I want to hear I'm a good person. Horton says religion, spirituality and moral earnestness, what

Paul calls the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. That second

Timothy three, five can continue to thrive in our environment precisely because they avoid the scandal of Christ, the scandal of the cross.

Nobody will raise a fuss if you find Jesus helpful for your personal well -being and relationships, or even if you think he was the greatest person in history.

And by the way, that's kind of common in liberal churches. He's a great person, a model worthy of devotion and emulation.

But start talking about the real crisis, the real problem where our best efforts are filthy rags.

And Jesus came to bear the condemnation of helpless sinners who place their confidence in him rather than in themselves.

And people begin shifting in their seats, even in churches. They don't want to hear about how they are dead in their sins and trespasses.

They want to hear about they're good and they should get better.

OK, number six, true or false, relying on abstract principles can set you up for failure.

Now, I will define sort of abstract principles. What I mean by that is, if I could substitute it this way, relying on creeds, confessions, time -tested principles can set you up for failure.

That is false. Horton says, we have enthroned ourselves as the final arbiters of righteousness, the ultimate rulers of our own experience and destiny.

We are the Pharisees of the new millennium. And by the way, when he says we, he's mostly talking about Americans.

He goes on to say, Barna studies suggest that most Americans value time and efficiency over everything else.

That's the 15 minute sermon. Minimizing long term commitments, maintaining independence and individuality at all costs, even to the point of being skeptical of institutions, people and authorities.

How often do you hear people say they're spiritual, but they don't like church? That the church basically kills spirituality.

He goes on to say, after all, people are being told every day, you are unique and you shouldn't submit to the expectations of others.

I mean, my Facebook feed is filled with that. Above all, trust your feelings to guide you.

Rely upon or he says relying upon absolute principles places unrealistic limitations on you.

Only you know what is right or best for you at any given moment in those circumstances.

What do you what do you think when you hear that only you know what is best or right for you in a given circumstance?

What's that? That's the world. That is the world.

Trust yourself. Listen to your heart. Cut your own path. There's nobody like you.

Be yourself. And if church is sounding like that, then you're really not in a church.

True or false. Number seven, preaching should include theological instruction. What we might call doctrine.

True, true. He says, even

Lutheran young people who were active in the church could not define grace or justification.

Highlighting the disparity between what churches say they believe and what they are actually communicating week in and week out.

In other words, if we don't repeat certain things that we don't repeat the gospel, if we don't repeat doctrinal truths,

I mean, you know, how many times? And I don't know the answer to this right off the top of my head. I should have looked it up. I think it might be like it's more than a dozen.

In first and second Timothy and Titus, the idea or the concept of sound doctrine or sound teaching comes up repeatedly.

Why? Because Paul's instructing these young men on how to teach in a church, how to operate a church.

And he says, these things matter. Sound doctrine, sound teaching. You have to instruct the people over and over again.

Why is that? Well, first of all, because you're going to have new people come in on a weekly basis.

Right. Visitors and whatnot. But secondly, why do we repeat things? Because we forget them.

Or we push them out of our minds. I mean, how many times this happens a lot in our home?

And I won't name any names, but someone will say,

I've never heard that before. And I'm like. Have I been with you so long?

Oh, she's watching on TV. Oh, hi. Listen, all of us do this.

We all forget things. This is kind of what we do. You know, it's like it's like we're computers and we've exceeded our memory limit.

Right. And so we push things out of our brains. And then when we hear it again, we go, oh, that sounds vaguely familiar.

I know it's right, but it feels like I'm learning it for the first time. So it's good to hear things again.

And Peter even said that in one of his epistles. He said, it's good and right for me to tell you these things.

Why? Because it's good for you and because you forget these things. Number eight, true or false.

Charles Finney was a semi -Pelagian. Now it's fair,

I think, Vadim, for me to define what a semi -Pelagian is.

What's a semi -Pelagian? What's that?

Half a Pelagian. It could be a quarter of a Pelagian. What's a

Pelagian? And by the way, this is going to be the answer to a future question. So you want to pay attention to this.

OK, Pelagius taught that Adam and Eve, when they fell, it had absolutely no impact on the rest of us.

We just get a free pass. OK. So semi -Pelagians say, listen, you know, the

Bible may say that you're dead in your sins and trespasses. But let me tell you the truth. The semi -Pelagian will say this, that you're only mostly dead.

And for those of you laughing, shame on you. You're only mostly dead.

There's still that little, you know, some people say island of righteousness. There's that little bit of, you know, why?

Why do you have to have some kind of, you can't be completely dead. Why is that, according to the semi -Pelagian?

Because you have to choose. Forgetting, of course, that you must be born again.

That you're dead in your sins and trespasses until God makes you alive. Until the

Holy Spirit gives you a new heart, new affections, etc. So, back to the question.

Number eight, true or false, Charles Finney was a semi -Pelagian. And that is false, because he was a total

Pelagian. Like the worst heretic in American history. One of Charles Finney's little things,

Mike and I did a show the other day. And I don't know if you remember, let me see if I can remember what

Mike said. He said something about ministry, and I said, yeah. I said, that's why at BBC we have the anxious bench.

And he just started laughing uncontrollably. Why was that? And I'll tell you why. Charles Finney invented the anxious bench.

And the anxious bench is this. You show up on Sunday morning, right? And people who are normally here just kind of show up, and they sit down, or whatever.

But maybe there's somebody here who isn't a believer. And so what do you do?

You sit them in the anxious bench. It's where everybody who sits there is supposed to be like, oh, they're antsy.

They're the ones who come forward. They're the ones who answer the call. They're the ones who, quote, unquote, receive

Christ. And they might do it again and again and again and again. So Charles Finney did not believe in original sin.

Charles Finney thought, I mean, if you ever read Charles Finney, you're welcome to do so if you want to.

But you'll get the idea that Charles Finney might have been not really a pastor, but maybe a carpet salesman or something else.

Because everything is very kind of Americanized, but it's very sales -oriented.

How do we compel people to come to Christ? How do we convince them? How do we change their minds kind of thing?

Instead of just preach the word, we've got to come up with techniques like the anxious bench. So Charles Finney was a semi -Pelagian.

He wishes he was a semi -Pelagian. That would be a massive improvement. Number nine, why did

American Christianity have to, and see, I even bolded that there, have to morph from traditional

Christianity? Why did that have to happen? And I think there are a number of reasons for that.

And by the way, I did skip over this. It's just a note that I meant to add here. But Charles Finney, his most famous sermon is called, listen to this,

Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts. So that should give you some insights about Charles Finney.

Why did American Christianity have to morph from traditional Christianity? Andrew. A clarifying question.

Uh -oh. Okay, go ahead. Well, let's presume that when it came over from Europe, traditional

Christianity was still intact. So what about Americans would cause them to reject traditional

Christianity? Individualism, right? Rugged individualism, the idea that we don't rely on anyone else or anything else.

We are unique. And here's what Horton said. He said, the creedal, objective, and historical faith of traditional

Christianity could not be translated into purely subjective terms.

In other words, you have this objective truth. Well, Americans like subjective truth.

We like each individual person to have their own truth. What's true for you might not be true for me.

However, there is an inherent problem with that, right? It's called the rule of non -contradiction or the law of non -contradiction.

If A is true and B contradicts A, B can't also be true.

They both can't be true at the same time. And this is a conversation that is so easy.

I mean, it's one that you have repeatedly with children. But for adults, this should be pretty easy.

You say this is true, but it can't just be true for you. It has to be true, period. So he says, however, precisely because American religion has long cherished its opposition to more traditional forms of Christianity in favor of the sovereign inner experience of the individual, it not only survives but thrives in the atmosphere of this secularizing process.

And if we think about, we were talking about it yesterday, and I'm like, you know, it's pretty amazing if we just think about the history of cults in the

United States. I mean, I'd wager we've probably invented more false religions than probably the rest of the world put together.

We're really good at it. And one of the reasons for that is because we like things that feel right to us.

Regardless of whether they're objectively true, if they feel right, they are true. So why did it have to morph?

Well, in part because we like our feelings to be aligned with what we consider to be true.

Number 10, true or false, God is sometimes anguished by our actions.

Andrew, what do you think about that?

God is up in heaven sort of going, Man, Steve, I wish you wouldn't do that.

Okay, but anguished by our actions. I mean, this is like, what is this?

This is like, you know, taking a kind of human parents and projecting those kind of emotions.

Do we get anguished by what our kids do? Sometimes. So God must be like us.

Horton says, in a therapeutic paradigm, not only the parishioner, but even

God is put on the couch as we empathetically interpret his feelings. God is never angry or judgmental toward people.

In fact, he is more anguished than we are, since he knows how much our actions can harm us.

He is simply waiting for us to come to our senses, like the father in the parable of the prodigal son, hoping that we'll come to an end of ourselves and come running home, right?

We might even be inclined, Horton writes, to feel sorry for this deity. He says these sermon samples treated

God exclusively as the extravagant lover. In fact, love overwhelms law.

God sets aside any question of merit, duty, or achievement and simply embraces the prodigal.

God never really surprises us because his behavior is always predictable. He would never do anything to offend us.

Consequently, there is no suggestion that we need a mediator at all, according to these sermons.

God's love need not be correlated with his holiness, righteousness, and justice. Those things are all in the background, right?

That's American evangelicalism, where God is just constantly rooting for us. He's on our side.

And, you know, to think otherwise is to demote God. That would challenge his immutability, his passivity, right?

That he's not subject to emotions. Well, when we sin, does

God respond? He chastises us, okay? He might discipline us, right?

But ultimately, you know, here's the thing, because here's what we get lost in, and this is an

American thing too. Do better, try harder. Why? Because if we do better, try harder, get better, then

God will be pleased. And when we sin, when we fall short,

God is displeased. Now, doesn't

God sound a lot like us? So let me just address this, and we'll get to Taylor. All of language is, in essence, a combination.

You know, Mike likes to call it baby talk, you know, because, you know, is

God limited by our language? And the answer is no. You know, why is

God incomprehensible? Because there are no words sufficient to describe him. Because he's the creator, he's omni -everything, and we are the creation.

And so our ability to grasp the infinite just doesn't exist.

We can only take snippets of it, and so that's why, you know, all that stuff is true. Taylor.

Okay, well, I mean, we can talk about, you know, grieving and drunkenness and dissipation, all those kind of things, you know, in Ephesians.

But suffice it to say that, well, here's where I wanted to go with this, is, you know, is God more pleased in us when we obey more?

Because what we forget is we have a mediator. Thankfully, we have a mediator.

And it's being in our mediator, it's being in Christ. So if God looked at Steve and said, you know what,

Steve's doing really good, I am 97 % satisfied with Steve. I mean, that would be great, like in seminary or college or anything.

I mean, even a seminary, that's still an A, 97. Anything below 96, not an

A. But 97, yes, an A. Here's the problem. I don't need 97%.

What do I need? 100%. How do I get that? By doing better, trying harder.

I have 100%. And it's not because of what I do. It's because of what

Jesus Christ has done. And this so often gets lost in the shuffle, Charlie. There's a response, but, you know, it...

Right, in Christianity, the paradigm is, you know, guilt, grace, gratitude. It's not guilt, grace, obligation.

You know, it's not guilt, grace, yoke. Right? And sometimes that's how it's presented.

Ought we to obey? The answer is yes. When we disobey, and we will,

God doesn't give us the boot. Why? Again, because he's not looking at us as Steve's objective righteousness, because that would be really 97%.

That's pretty funny. He looks at me and he says, you know,

Steve is in Christ Jesus, my beloved son. I'm satisfied because he's in Christ.

Right. I mean, there are all kinds of things that come into play here. There's, you know, there's antinomianism, meaning

I have no obligation. There's legalism. And then there's kind of a variation of legalism, which is, you know, judgmentalism.

Right. I've done this and I've done it. I mean, it's arrogance and pride is essentially what it is.

But what we need to do is always go back, take a step back and go back to the gospel and think, okay, why do

I do anything? Why am I anything to God? I'm only something to God because Christ bought me.

That's it. And if we have that in mind, we won't fall into a lot of these traps here.

Well, we have to we have to close. But let me just I think we can do number 11 and we'll just do it.

Why would American evangelicalism deemphasize God's transcendence, deemphasize

God's transcendence? And it's not I don't think it's all that mysterious because we want, you know, and this is

I would argue this is one of the main features of a religion like Mormonism.

We want to think that God isn't that much different than us. And so, you know, passages,

I mean, it's just like, how could you even get this idea like in Mormonism that one day you're going to become like God?

When you look at Isaiah six, which was recently read here from the pulpit, you just think here's

Isaiah, probably, arguably the most righteous man in Israel. He sees the transcendent

God and he doesn't say what? You know, I'm almost there. I can just see if I just take a couple more steps,

I'll get there. He says, what? I'm undone.

He's just like, I, you know, I'm ready to pack it in.

Horton says this. He says liberals and revivalists both deemphasize God's transcendence and tend to see

God's word as something that wells up within a person. In other words, it's subjective rather than something that comes to a person from the outside.

This is one of the main problems with American evangelicalism over and over again. It's the subjectivism instead of objectivism.

The truth is outside of us. American evangelicalism says the answer is inside of you.

One man said this. He said the key to salvation thus lies within the self. The charge to the individual person is to listen and be receptive to this inner voice.

Also, since sin was regarded largely as an error or ignorance, the view prevailed that behavioral change can come about through education about ethical and moral concerns.

This is just as unchristian as it can get. Conversion is basically self -fulfillment.

Conversion is up to us, but it's relatively easy to attain.

It only requires emotional self -awareness, openness, and receptivity. This is therapeutic moral deism.

You can get this from a psychologist or you can come on Sunday morning and listen to this talk. Anyway, we have to close, but I just wanted to share what's on my heart.

Our Father in Heaven, Lord, we just thank you for the gospel. We thank you for the Lord Jesus Christ.

We thank you that you have revealed these things to us, often in spite of our best efforts, in spite of the efforts of our family, but in the midst of chaos and sin and everything else, you, by your sovereign will, broke through it all and convicted us of our sin, convicted us of our need for a

Savior, gave us new hearts, new desires, and a longing to follow the

Lord Jesus Christ. Father, help us not to think we need to do better, although we do, but to think what a glorious salvation has been won for us by Jesus Christ.